Aly Talibab

By: Angie Balata

Aly Talibab stands onstage and before he begins, you can already feel that this 22-year-old is about to change something in you. He is comfortable with the spotlight, not because he wants to be a star, but because he knows this is the pulpit from which he can talk about change. His words, laden with questions and complex in meaning, have the power to make you stop and think ‘what if,’ to consider the other side. Born in the UAE, Talibab comes from Sudanese bloodlines; his family is Nubian in origin. Born Mohammed Aly Talibab, he chooses to go by the name Aly to honor the memory of the man who has most impacted his life. “From when I was young, my father always talked about all the things I was going to do for him and how proud he was that I would carry his name, especially since he had three girls before I came along,” the young musician recalls. “He was my friend and he would always take me to hang out with his friends. […] In El Ain [UAE], he was the famous Aly the Sudanese, he knew a lot of people. I loved him a lot.” The elder Talibab, a teacher, died when his son was 11, after a long battle with Hepatitis C that destroyed his liver. “At night I’d hear him cry from pain and pretend to be sleeping because I didn’t want to see him like that. He was always the strong one and it was hard to see him suffering like that,” Talibab recalls. Shortly before his father’s death, the family moved back to Egypt where the father took dialysis treatments. “It was during this time that my ideas and biases against the capitalist life began,” Talibab says. “When we returned to Egypt, I would rarely visit him in the hospital because I didn’t want to see him like that. I went once just before he died and he was in the ICU — I hadn’t seen him for a month and didn’t recognize him when I saw him. He’d lost a lot of weight and was very sick. When I got there he was flirting with a nurse, he always flirted with girls. He sat with me and told me that I am the man and that now I had the responsibility of the family and I had to take care of my sisters. I didn’t really understand what he was talking about; I was only 11 years old then. It was the last time I saw him. After his father’s death, his mother became the breadwinner, forced to raise four children on her own. But she was determined to give Talibab the best education and put him in IG schools. Thrown into the pool of the wealthy, he was seemingly from the financially comfortable, but his family often struggled to make ends meet. At the same time, he had begun seeking friends from different socioeconomic circles. But having been raised in the UAE, he had missed important cultural stepping-stones in any regular childhood in Egypt, leaving him feeling alienated. These challenges and contradictions in his sense of identity affected his musical approach, and up through the end of high school, Talibab was known in most circles as a rapper, imitating the gangster rap popular at the time. Even though Talibab had stellar grades in high school and got many scholarships to private universities, he chose to go to Cairo University. The scholarships could be revoked for any reason, and he didn’t want his mother scraping for the money to continue his education. “For me it was important to finish my studies so that I could make money and return it to my mom. I couldn’t go off to become a musician, I had all these responsibilities because I was not alone — there are others who also depend on me.” At the same time, Talibab was living in an area where there were lot of problems between the Nubians and the Saeedis. From his grandmother, he started learning more about his Nubian history and how his people were evicted from their lands because of Nasser’s High Dam. As he learned about the government’s broken promises to the Nubians and experienced racism in Cairo because of his darker skin color, his ideas began to change and his taste in music moved towards the likes of Nina Simone, Mos Def and Talib Kweli. He turned to the African-American movement of the 1960s and the works of Martin Luther King and Mumia Jamal. The song he is most proud of writing during this period was “Fil Balad,” about rebelling against the system. In the chorus, he says, “I will die for the country and live for the country but if the country enslaves me, I will sell out the country…” By 2011 and the January 25 Revolution, Talibab had fully moved into the world of spoken word set to a mix of beats, samples, and rock music. In less than three years, Talibab had gone from a rapper in the making to a poet grounded in the creation of change. He recorded five tracks summarizing the changes he’d been going through personally and the breakdown of the political system at large. Like others, he marched in the streets and was arrested, moving philosophically towards the political left without wearing the badge of any political group. Not a fan of sloganeering, Talibab admits that all this “was really personal. I wasn’t doing it for the poor or anything like that. I was doing this for myself because I’d seen what the state was doing. […] I was rebelling through my music. I wanted to do events, not so people could come and dance, but because I wanted the concerts to turn into demonstrations. We are not doing concerts so we can come and have a good time. This was my role, I was making music for this.” Talibab takes particular joy in doing street concerts, noting that being in the street means talking to the people, there is an authenticity you just can’t get anywhere. But as the political system has seemingly cycled back to the Mubarak days, there is bitterness in his words when he talks about music. His latest track “What After Despair?” — part of his work with the music collective El Manzouma — is dark and with a lot less of the passion of his previous music. “It’s not important for me to just make music for the people,” says Talibab sadly. “I’ve stopped trusting in the people, I’ll always be walking under the authority of others. In the revolution, it was the 18 days in the street that were great and in any moment of battle, it is always that moment itself of battle that is great, in that moment it’s all pure and the moment is about breaking boundaries and being free. But when the moment passes it becomes about what am I going to do, what will I [do for] work, how will I feed my kids. So I’ve started looking to understand myself, where have I come, where am I going and what am I doing. It comes from a Gandhi idea that before you can change what’s around you, you need to change and understand yourself.” et